National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that President Joe Biden is committed to helping Afghans who helped the U.S. Military during our 20-year engagement.
Sullivan said, “The SIV program which has existed for many years was not designed for a mass evacuation. That’s just the truth. It was a bipartisan bill in Congress that was designed with a series of gates that each applicant had to pass through. You know how long the average time was for someone to pass through those gates? Not because of Joe Biden but because of the nature of this legislation. 18 to 24 months per visa application. Some took years. When President Biden took office, he inherited a backlog of thousands of these Visa applications, and he did cut through the red tape in a massive way. He slashed the amount of time to process these visas. In July, he actually began an airlift of SIV applicants out of Afghanistan and to the United States.”
He continued, “Now, it is true that he didn’t conduct a 120,000-person evacuation in July, but he judged at the time that doing so would have caused the even more rapid and precipitous collapse of the Afghan government. In hindsight, given that it collapsed anyway, should we have started earlier? That’s something that can be debated. But the notion that Joe Biden was not focused on processing these applications quickly, getting people on planes out of the country, I don’t think the record backs that up. I think the president has been committed to helping those who helped us. He deployed 6,000 troops into harm’s way to help get out the people who helped us along with Americans and others.”
“He continues to be insistent that the United States will stay focused on getting out remaining Afghans to the United States. 120,000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan,” Sullivan added. “I know there are people who say that’s not enough. There’s got to be more. And we’re not done. but honestly, Nicolle, the argument that somehow this is Joe Biden not standing up for the Afghan people and standing up for Afghans who helped us, this was a historic airlift that went far beyond what anybody had reasonably anticipated going into this.”
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